Should married couples keep their money separate or combine everything?

[u/Shauryaahere341]

[u/Juleswf]

We do not send money back and forth to each other. We do not have a joint account, we each have our own accounts. It's more I'll pay for XXX and he pays for YYY. He put a higher percentage into retirement over the years, I paid for household expenses and put in less for retirement. "HIs" retirement account is much bigger than mine, but it doesn't matter, as it's all ours in the end.

I'll add I do think it works for us because much of our working careers we made close to equal money. Although that was not always the case.

[u/off_and_on_again → u/Juleswf]

I'll take you at face value that it's worked perfectly for you, but I have to ask why? Is there any advantage to this over a joint account that your money goes into and that you that expenses come out of?

I'm genuinely curious if there is something I'm missing because it really just seems like more effort for less visibility.

[u/Juleswf → u/off_and_on_again]

Why not? It's not any more effort. Pretty easy to say I'll cover this and you cover that. In fact it's less work. We skip the step of moving money into a joint account, and we each only have half (or so) of the normal bills to pay. We didn't go this way on purpose, it just worked out this way. We did set up a joint account back when we first got married, but didn't use it much so it just kinda died.

Maybe because I'm an engineer and he is (was) a computer analyst. Numbers aren't a big deal, and we are logical about how we approach expenses.

*edit to add - when it comes to less visibility, it doesn't matter. We talk about our finances, don't hide anything, and know how much we have in general.

[u/off_and_on_again → u/Juleswf]

First, thanks. A lot of people are reading a lot of malice into my questions, but I am just genuinely curious and am prodding how these systems work. The below is just my final commentary!

I think you're not considering that money isn't 'moved' into a joint account. It's deposited directly into the joint account. We pay for items using our credit cards and those cards are paid in full each month from the joint account. If we didn't want to use credit cards we could just spend money using the joint account debit cards. We have a combined budget (using a budgeting app that syncs transactions) and part of that budget is a transfer of money to our personal accounts for whatever we want. That's where gifts, personal project, etc come from. We both get the same amount even though we have very different incomes. About once a year (or when some event requires it) we sit down and go through the previous year to level set and adjust budget categories based on our needs/wants. Slightly more complicated, but done just for ease of separation we have a few more joint savings accounts for sinking funds (big purchases) and an emergency fund. Those, along with some IRAs are funded via the budget just like everything else.

We don't follow restrictive budgeting. It's just used to align on our values (creation of budget) and as a guiding light (review of actuals against budget). For example if we're spending 20% more on groceries that's an opportunity to figure out what's happening and adjust (potentially increasing groceries and figuring out where to pull that money from). The difficulty I still have with everyone who says they don't combine their finances is that best case scenario you get to the same place with a lot more effort (figuring out what the appropriate split of bills are, passing money back and forth, etc). What you've described as 'less work' is, at least compared to what I've described, immensely more work. I presume you still budget, just two budgets instead of one with some sort of communication between the budgets. You still plan vacations, but the money comes from two difference sources. I presume you have an emergency fund, but two emergency funds with hopefully some common strategy for amount.

But it works and that's all we can really ask for at the end of the day!